July 21, 2010

Dill Butter

I'm not even that nuts about it, really. It's Bill who loves dill. (Sorry, couldn't resist the rhyme.)

Well, one day recently (I've lost track of time) I decided to pick a bunch of dill and make a compound butter with it, as a way of preserving it.

I didn't want to dry it - we have only so much drying space available, and first there was all the garlic, and then lavender, and now coriander. (That's it down there, right after Alex harvested it for me.)

Those things take up lots of space, and I don't seem to have a lot of that.

So.

I picked a lot of dill and I tried to pick the younger stalks - the ones without heads that had gone to seed.

Let me see if I can find a picture...

Nope.

Oh well. I cut a bunch of stalks, then snipped the feathery fronds off the main stalk and smaller but still fibrous stems. All the stems went into the compost, and then I chopped up all the fronds until they were fairly fine. (This paragraph today was brought to you by the letter F.)

I also took a couple sticks of unsalted butter out of the fridge. In the temperatures we've been having, it took, oh, 2.76 seconds for it to soften to room temperature.

Then, because I wanted to know how much dill I'd have per portion, I measured out all the chopped dill by teaspoon. I'd decided somewhere in my little brain that I'd portion it out in tablespoon amounts, so roughly one tablespoon of butter would contain a teaspoon of dill.

Anyway, I had, it turned out, fourteen teaspoons of dill. So I measured out 14 tablespoons of butter.

And here's what that all looked like:

Next, after admiring my piles of dill, I scraped them into the bowl with the butter. Then I took a couple of pictures.

(I like this next one the best.)

Anyway, I mixed and mashed and stirred until the dill was well distributed throughout the butter.

Then I spooned it, by tablespoon, onto a parchment-lined plate. The butter was very soft, so some of the scoops aren't as aesthetically pleasing as I would have liked.

But anyway, there they are:

I put them on a shelf in the freezer and went off to do other things. Like climb way up high on a ladder or something.

Okay, now, I meant to finish them up (i.e. pop them off the paper and store in a container) that night, or the next morning, but I didn't get to it til two days later.

So.

We'll just

pretend

that time

is elapsing

right now

as I type

until finally

it is two days

later.

And here they are, fresh and frozen from the freezer. (Another F-sponsored sentence.)

(You DO understand that reference, I hope? Some of you?)

Here's a close-up:

Yes, little tiny ice crystals have formed. But I am reckless and I care not.

Anyway, one by one I (very quickly - temps are still high) popped each little blob of dill butter off the paper and into a container.

Then I snapped the lid on, wrote on the lid, and put the container in the freezer. Ta-da!

And that's that.

Now, it's true, I could have used ice cube trays and made all the little blobs (oh, that word reminds me of my Algebra II teacher in high school...she'd use terms like "blobs" and "squiggles" to represent sets.) uniform in size and shape. But then I'd have to clean the greasy ice cube trays afterward, and I don't like doing that. So that's why I went the tablespoon route.

So what will we use it for? Probably a chowder or two. Maybe biscuits, or bread. Who knows. But the main thing is, we have it available. And it will be nice to have the flavor of fresh dill in the middle of winter without having to shell out gobs of money to buy some limp fronds at the store, right? Right!

Oh, and even more recently, we picked the majority of the dill heads that have gone to seed. We'd given a couple to my sister, and here are the rest:

Okay, gotta run. Need to feed the troops, maybe throw together some pesto, pick and stuff some squash blossoms, and then work on shingling the front of the house.